J. Michael Smith, Esq.
President

Michael Farris:
One concept Susan Wise Bauer outlines in her book for use with children of all ages is narration. Simply put, younger children tell back what they have just heard, in their own words. A parent can then write these "stories" down and read them back to their young children. The children will enjoy seeing how close they come to the original.

Narration develops skills like summarizing, finding the main idea, and isolating important details, all valuable skills for future writing projects.

This approach works especially well with history. Though 1st and 2nd-graders are spending the bulk of their time getting the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic mastered, time spent introducing them to history and science will build vocabulary and establish the factual framework for future learning.

Here's Susan's approach for history studies with younger children: Read together a small portion of a history survey, like The Usborne Book of World History, once or twice a week; write down the child's narration; have him draw a picture of something from the section that stood out to him; look up the region on a map and you've added geography.

Keep these narrations and drawings in a notebook, and you'll end up with a great record of what you've studied that year. As the child's skills progress, he'll record his own narration, which is an excellent preparation for advanced writing.

I'm Mike Farris.